We crossed the eastern continental divide at, I think, 3,100 feet, past the on-ramp for the Blue Ridge Parkway and just ahead of Boone, a college town thronged with well-appointed young people and, apparently, their parents. This area is North Carolina’s high country, evoking a pleasing symmetry: each end of the continent has a place called the high country and each has, at its high points, a hydrological divide, two guideposts directing the downward flow of water to the oceans. The eastern continental divide is less dramatic than the western divide, the Great Divide, because the Appalachian mountain range is much older than the Rockies, formed 480 million years ago to the Rockies’ 65, or so, million. The eastern mountains have much longer to be worn down and smoothed over.